I feel like I’ve been talking the talk for so long. But I wonder if I’ve been walking the walk. My intentions are so good and yet I often feel like I fall short. What am I talking about? Well, pretty much everything. I mean to eat better, I mean to train harder and tri better. I say that we eat healthy. It’s all easy to say and it’s relatively easy to “do” if you’re just looking at the surface. What the heck am I talking about and why do I sound like a crazy person?

It’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is and this time I mean this about food.

This is how it started – the lunches that we send with our kids to school. I said, “we eat healthy.” And a few weeks ago as I was packing lunches I realized that once the sandwich went in, almost everything else was a prepackaged (read processed) snack food. When I actually realized what I was doing, I took the food out. I took it out and replaced it with a sandwich, a hard-boiled egg, carrots, cut up red peppers, a much smaller amount of goldfish crackers and an apple. I counted the calories and even still was sure that the kiddo that was getting that lunch was getting more than necessary, but at least none of it was “packaged” and was overall a much better intention for their lunch. Whew. Since then, pretty major lunch over haul. Similar thing are going each day, but we have guacamole as a dipping sauce for carrots or maybe humus. We have yummy, delicious, real foods. We have a lunch put together that I’m certain some adults wouldn’t even eat because it’s too healthy looking. And truth be told, the kid has been coming home and telling me how great his lunch is each day. Winning….. I am winning.

I’ve done this same sort of thing to my own food intake. We have a whole wellness plan at work that awards points based on activity, logs ins, steps taken and food intake. I’ve been using the myfitness pal app to track food intake and that certainly does keep you honest … if you log what you eat. I also found myself working out a little extra so I could still eat the crap that I wanted to eat. It’s a vicious cycle. So now I’m trying to get out of it. I am still logging what I eat, but I have cut out some real trigger foods. I am working on eating almost a strictly vegetarian diet because I find that when I stay plant-based and am eating a lot of beans, etc. that I am indeed full and my cravings for crap are more clearly identified as cravings for crap. I recognize that what I just said makes almost zero sense. But I think that if I limit myself in this way, I can eat more … it’ll just be veggies. It will force me to prepare foods so I’ll have to be more thoughtful rather than just throwing food into my mouth. And ultimately, hopefully, the foods that I choose will be a bit calorie dense. We will see what happens. In addition, I too am now taking things like hardboiled eggs, carrots and cut up peppers to work as food. Funny when you put them in your kids lunch but not in your own. Time to flip a roo that scenerio!

So I’m setting a better intention. I’m eating better and I hope to start sharing some of what we are eating right here. Of course, I AM NOT making my family members skip the meat but I’m providing the meat free options alongside the meat free options. And above all we are just all trying to think a bit more about what we are eating and making sure that it’s worth it. So, I’ll share the recipes as they likely won’t be mine but I can tell you where to get them and if they’re worth it. Deal? Deal!

What intention have you set recently that is inspiring you and helping to you head purposeful into your daily life?

2 Responses to Setting the Intention to Do Better

So ironically the reason I went first vegetarian and then vegan was to cut out the junk – because I always gravitate toward the worst choices . So when I ate meat – I never ate chicken – but sausage was cool. When I was vegetarian – more cheese please. Vegan – oreos and wine. But the bottom line is the more restrictive I am , the more restrictive my choices so a few oreos and wine in an otherwise clean diet is better than sausage egg and cheese in a over processed not clean diet.
I wish I had started it all when I was younger, for my kids’ sake. They always ate healthier than friends did BUT it was still processed because that is what time and finances allowed at the time. Now they both eat very healthy. Cassie is GF and dairy free and eats mostly vegetarian and Nikki is married to a meat and potatoes guy but eats as little processed as possible and loves kale, polenta and eats very little to no dairy.
You have the intention, it doesn’t happen overnight. You didn’t decide – I am going to do an Ironman and do it the next day. You made changes, in life and in training, you skipped a work out if you had to, you worked harder the next day, you woke up some days and said “I don’t want to do this”, you did it anyway – and you are an IRONMAN.
Proud of you for that, proud of you for this.
PS – Ive been vegan for over a year and was vegetarian for almost 5 years before that. Joe is NOT starving to death.